Stapleton Manor
by Whinter
Summary: The long-deferred sequel to "Galway." Finding each other was easy. The tricky part for Buffy, Angel, and Spike is getting safely away from Galway before the vengeful powers of evil catch up with them.


Stapleton Manor

A Sequel to "Galway"

A whole week, he frets to himself, as he surveys the organized chaos in the ops room. A whole week, and not a word. She doesn't write, she doesn't call, she doesn't send so much as a ruddy homing pigeon with a message tied to its leg…

"Sir! I think we've got a line on Buffy."

" _Really?_ Smashing. And about time, frankly. Has the chip finally reported in?"

"No, Mr. Giles, still no signal. But we've got a sit-rep from Maeve in Dublin. Would you like—?"

"Thank you, Miss Hakim, I believe I would like to see it." Giles finishes polishing his glasses and takes the printout from the duty slayer at the decryption board. As he reads, he glances up frequently, with a slightly deeper frown each time. Perhaps he should add logic to the curriculum of Stapleton Manor. A course in the fine art of not jumping to conclusions.

"This seems a little thin, Miss Hakim. There must be many blonde women in Dublin, a good few with American accents, and presumably some of those are in the habit of visiting art galleries. What leads you to think this one might be Buffy?"

Fawzia Hakim waves towards the girls clustered at the bank of security monitors. "Ask Dawnie," she says.

"Dawn?" he calls, turning. "Can you elucidate?"

"Well—no," Dawn says over her shoulder, "but I can explain."

Giles sighs. Perhaps a vocabulary enrichment course as well? "In this context, Dawn, explain and elucidate mean roughly the same—never mind. Please be so kind as to _explain_ , then."

"It's about the painting," Kennedy pipes up from her post at the aetheric scanner.

"Painting?"

It is Dawn's turn to sigh. She keeps her eyes on the monitors, but the line of her back screams embarrassment to Giles' practiced eye. "Guess I should have told you before, but I didn't think it was important. Till now," she adds.

"Well?"

Dawn swivels her head momentarily towards Giles, then back to the monitors. "It was in one of the colour supps a couple weeks ago – the Sunday Times magazine. A big splashy article about the art scene in Dublin. Cool pix."

"As in, pleasing photographs, correct? And?"

"Well, one of them was really strange—very dark and Gothy, with cliffs and a stormy sea, that sort of thing. I thought it was mega-cool, but..." She stops. Giles sees the visible back of her neck redden, as if she is blushing.

"I must say, getting this story from you is like pulling teeth from a stone statue. What about the painting? What painting?"

Dawn hesitates. "Fawzia," she says, "google it for him. It's better if he sees for himself."

"Why can't you just tell me? Spit it out, girl." But Giles bends over Fawzia's monitor as her fingers fly over the keyboard, inputting search terms: _Dublin, Padraig Fine Art, reclusive ._ A grid of thumbnail images comes up on her screen.

"This one, sir," she says, clicking. Giles frowns at the dark mass of muted colours filling the screen: a landscape, or perhaps one would call it a seascape, rather in the romanticist mode. "Hmm," he says, "surprisingly 18th century in its sensibility and composition, though I see overtones of the 19th as well; possible echoes of Turner, if Turner worked in those dark colours, or perhaps a touch of Friedrich—" He stops, blinks rapidly, looks more closely.

"How very bizarre," he murmurs. "It almost looks like…"

"Yeah! That's what I thought, too. Guys, watch my screens?" Dawn jumps up from her post, joins Giles. "It took me a minute to notice, but now I can't _not_ see him. It's a pretty good resemblance, too."

"Well, it _broods_ , I will say that. But that is what cliffs generally appear to be doing. And I fail to see what this interesting optical illusion has to with Buffy being out of touch in this reprehensible manner."

Dawn's blush is back. "I—uh—showed it to her. I was just looking at the mag, and she was there, and I was all _wow, Buffy, check out the cliff in this painting, looks just like Angel_. And she was all _don't be silly, Dawnie._ And I was all, _but the picture's so cool, and there's a girl in it looks just like you._ And she was all—"

"Never mind. I can infer the rest. What happened then?"

"Well, when she finally looked at the picture, she went all quiet. I felt bad for reminding her about Angel, because, you know—still grieving? But the picture just totally took me by surprise. Anyway, she looked at the magazine for a while, and then she gave it back to me and changed the subject. And that was it."

"Gripping. But I'm still not sure why you think it's relevant."

"I didn't at first. Then she went off a few days later, didn't tell anyone where she was going, deactivated her locater chip—and I got to thinking. So I dug through the recycling and found the magazine, and guess what? That page was missing, like she'd torn it out. So we asked Maeve to check out the gallery in Dublin. And that's it. We figure maybe Buffy wanted to buy the painting."

"I see. And who else knows about this hypothesis of yours?"

Dawn shrugs, but the blush is deeper. "The girls."

"Which girls?"

"Well, you know…the slayers, Willow, Mrs. Billings…"

" _Mrs. Billings?_ May I ask why you confided in the cook, and not in me?"

She shrugs again. "I would have felt dumb telling you. It was weird, sure, but not _weird._ Anyway, not the sort of _weird_ to interest you. Not till we heard back from Maeve. I mean, you'd just have told us we were jumping to conclusions, and needed to get our logic checked."

"Not at all," Giles says after a brief pause. "And please stop shrugging. You may be right about the blonde woman in Dublin, but…"

"Mr. Giles?" One of the Hua twins, at the tracker screen.

"Yes, er…"

"I'm Lai Lin, sir. And I just picked up Buffy's chip."

Dawn reaches the screen a bare half-pace ahead of Giles. "Where is she? Is it Dublin?"

"See for yourself."

Giles peers at the screen, a satellite image cheerfully dotted with colour-coded GPS blips. It seems to rush towards him as Lai Lin zooms in. She points to a bright yellow flasher in the centre of the screen.

"That's Buffy, sir. See the coordinates?"

"I see them," says Giles. "Good lord," he adds. "Dawn, kindly fetch Willow."

xxx

It was a bright afternoon in Galway, with the sky clearing and the grey sea darkening to a silver-sheened indigo—a rare day to be cherished for the sake of the gold pouring down from heaven. For some, anyway, the lucky sods. The man who emerged from the back door of the cottage into the sunny warmth was dressed like the beekeeper of a particularly vicious African killer swarm, draped in a heavy leather coat, leather gauntlets, and a broad-brimmed hat swathed in black netting. He trod carefully towards the garden gate, but stopped well short when he heard the sounds from the field.

"Gawd," he muttered, "still making up for lost time. Fair enough." He turned away.

Back in the house, he parted the netting over his face so he could see in the shuttered dimness. The packing was basically done. Liam's sketch blocks and all of his paintings, even the ones that had to be wrenched from their frames; his own notebooks, several files of poems, a box of disks, and the two laptops. The minimum of clothing, not that they had much to begin with, having nowhere much to go except the pub down the road, where sartorial elegance was not an entrance requirement. In fact, it was with great pleasure that William had bypassed the bag of dirty laundry, which now would never need to be done. A few books that one or the other of them couldn't live without, and that was it. Their time in Galway had not been spent acquiring objects of sentimental value.

He'd give them another half hour, he thought; just long enough to get the car packed and ready. And then, by Hecate, he'd have to drag them away from each other long enough to save their lives, because, happy as he had been to see Buffy, he had a bad feeling about how relatively easily she had found them. It was those numbwits at the gallery that he blamed. _No publicity_ was what Liam had specifically asked for, in words of few syllables that even an art dealer should have been able to grasp. No pictures, no autographs, no interviews, no PR of any sort. What part of "reclusive" had they not understood? Just sell a few paintings so he and Liam could have food on the table and blood in the fridge—that was all the idiots were supposed to do. What they _weren't_ supposed to do was blazon Liam's damned self-portrait-as-geological-feature all over a major Sunday magazine, where tens of millions of people would see it.

He picked up the larger crate of Liam's paintings, slinging it up to his shoulder as easily as if the box were empty. After rearranging the netting over his face, he slipped warily into the front garden and then across the lane, to a tumbledown shed smothered in nettles and sloes. Oddly, a new padlock held the door shut, both lock and door painted black to blend in with the shadows. William opened the padlock and tossed it into the bushes, its usefulness at an end. Then he swung the door open and peered in. Even the indirect light was enough to draw a galaxy of gleams off the dark hulk inside.

"My leetle burro," William said fondly.

xxx

Willow replaces Kennedy at the aetheric scanner—the device is her own invention, so who better to pull the last farthing of information from it? Her fingers on the keyboard are only part of the equation. She reads the ripples on the screen like an old sailor reading the sea, and after a while she nods slowly and looks sideways up at Giles and Dawn.

"It's Buffy, all right. I'd know that track anywhere. And it looks like she's alone. Anyway, there are no other aetheric tracks matching her position and trajectory. Lai Lin, what have you got? Plane, train, or ground vehicle?"

"Ground vehicle for sure, ma'am," says Lai Lin at the tracker screen, "and she's definitely on the M6. But it's funny. If she's coming here, she should've left the motorway at Hampford. "

Giles leans over Willow's shoulder, studying the aetheric track. "Not good. That could suggest she expects to be waylaid on the direct route, and is taking evasive action. Can you remote-view her, Willow?"

"What, right now? Not without preparation," says Willow, "but fortunately we can use another kind of magic."

"Scrying? Divination?"

She grins up at him. "CCTV. There are webcams all along the motorway."

"Technology," mutters Giles.

"Got it," says Lai Lin, whose fingers have been clattering away without waiting to be told. She hits a key, and the big wallscreen lights up with the image of a tree-fringed stretch of motorway. Light traffic trundles along and slips beneath the camera: a couple of lorries, some scattered cars, a tourist coach. Lai Lin's keys click again. A schematic appears in the upper corner of the wallscreen, a black grid inside which a flashing yellow dot approaches a steady green one. "I've hacked into the next webcam along Buffy's route, at the Belchurch exit," Lai Lin says, "and we should be seeing her right…about…wait for it…"

All eyes in the ops room are fixed on the wallscreen. More cars slide under the webcam. An SUV, another coach. Giles finds himself holding his breath.

"Now!" says Lai Lin. She highlights a vehicle that is changing lanes as they watch, weaving through the sparse traffic at a reckless clip. In seconds, it has flashed beneath the camera, and is gone. There is a stunned silence.

"Doubleyou-tee-eff," Dawn breathes at last.

"Language, Dawn," says Giles, who has recently been told what this stands for. "However, I fully share the spirit of your sentiment."

"Was that really a…? Did you see…?"

"Yes," says Giles. "It was, really, and I did see. Buffy is driving a hearse. How novel. Plan C, I think, Miss Hakim."

As Fawzia turns to the alarm panel, Lai Lin coughs for attention. She is already scrolling through screen caps on her monitor, and now she transfers one to the wallscreen. "There's something else, Mr. Giles," she says. In the image, reflections off the windscreen almost mask the interior of the vehicle, but it takes the viewers nanoseconds to see what Lai Lin has seen: the blurred outlines of _two_ figures in the front seat. The driver is clearly Buffy, from the size and the bright hair. The other is broader, darker, likely male.

Giles pushes up his glasses and peers from the wallscreen to the aetheric scanner and back again. "Willow, didn't you say Buffy's alone?"

Willow frowns at her beloved and theoretically infallible invention. "Yup. And that's still what the scanner says."

"Dear me," says Giles.

"Doubleyou-tee-eff?" Dawn suggests.

"Doubleyou-tee-eff indeed."

Willow leans back in her chair. "It's Angel," she says suddenly. "It's got to be Angel."

All across the room, the slayers go quiet.

"It can't be, Willow," says Dawn at last. "Angel's dead and dusted. You know that."

"Of course I know. But..."

"Additionally, there is a conspicuous absence of other aetheric tracks in the hearse," says Giles.

Willow scowls at the scanner. "I know that, too. Maybe he's found a way to mask his track. Theoretically, it can be done. But think about it, Giles—the painting, the trip to Ireland, the secrecy. As for the hearse, can you think of a better way of getting a vamp safely across the Irish Sea? She's found Angel, and she's bringing him home."

"It's a _courageous_ hypothesis, Willow."

"You'll see," says Willow stubbornly. "She's found Angel. That's him in the car. I can feel it in my gut."

"When you feel it in your head," says Giles, with a sharp edge to his voice, "do let me know." But he studies the blur in the passenger seat of the hearse, and his eyes are thoughtful.

xxx

When William finished packing the vehicle and returned to the house through the front door, they were just coming in through the back, moving together like extremely affectionate Siamese twins. They met William in the hallway.

"Well," William said with a drop of acidity, "I'm glad to see you're clothed. Let's get going."

"Going?" said Buffy dreamily.

"Hi, Will," said Liam. "What did you say?" He leaned to kiss the top of Buffy's head.

"I said, we have to go _._ _Now._ "

"Okay," Liam said. Buffy twisted towards him to slide her arms around his back, bringing their clinch impossibly closer.

William growled deep in his throat. "Don't make me use a crowbar. Come on, there'll be plenty of time for canoodling when we're safely away from here."

"Canoodling?" Liam laughed, a sound of pure 200-proof happiness. "Where did you get a word like that, Will?"

"I'm a poet. Buffy, Liam, snap out of it. For all we know, some nasty bugger from the dark side is already asking questions at the pub. There's no time to waste."

They were beginning to wake up. The glow remained, but something resembling sentience was returning to their eyes. "He's right," Buffy said, with some difficulty putting a whole quarter-inch between her and Liam. "We gotta get out of here."

"Fine, but where?" Liam glanced around the hallway with a look of surprise, as if only now noticing the chaos left there by William's packing, the tumble of discarded frames, the piles of rejected papers and books, the laundry bag.

"I was thinking maybe Buffy could adopt us," William said.

"What?"

"Stapleton Manor, you twit."

"Stapleton—?"

"Buffy, haven't you told him _anything?_ A Hogwarts clone, Liam, that Buffy set up for Slayers International, just across the Irish Sea. Using the money you nicked from Wolfram and Hart. Buffy?"

"Of course," Buffy said, "and of course I was going to suggest it. Actually, I was going to insist. It's the only place you can hope to be safe."

"As long as we're together," Liam said, which Buffy took as her cue for another earnest effort to melt their bodies into one. William cleared his throat meaningfully.

" _Now_ would be better," he said. "Everything's set up."

At last, reluctantly, Buffy and Liam disengaged far enough for daylight to show between them. "My car's just down the lane," Buffy said.

"Not any more. It's stashed in one of the abandoned gardens across the way. You can mail the keys and a nice fat cheque to the rental people once we're safely out of here. Don't worry, I took your stuff out first. And your purse is on the table."

"You went through my purse?"

"I had to," William said reasonably, "in order to steal your keys."

Liam looked around as if saying goodbye to the cottage, then became all business. "Where's the suit?"

"On your bed. Sorry, master, I didn't have time to polish your shoes. Buffy, I laid out that nice black trouser suit of yours—hurry, now."

"You went through my _suitcase?"_

"Just get changed! What does a bloke have to do to save people around here?"

Minutes later, a heavily veiled beekeeper led two somberly dressed figures across the road to the little shed. He flung open the door.

"A hearse?" said Buffy after a moment.

"Welcome," said Liam, "to the wonderful world of undertaking. Into the coffin, Will."

xxx

Giles polishes his specs for the umpteenth time in the last half hour, wondering if that little nervous habit of his will eventually wear the lenses away entirely. "Where's the next place she can come off the freeway?"

"Here, sir, Millcaster. I'm just getting the webcam up."

"Wait! Split the screen—keep the Belchurch webcam up as well." Willow is glancing back and forth between the wallscreen and the roiling colours of the scanner. The image on the wallscreen jumps and divides; on one side, a tourist coach slides smoothly into the Millcaster exit. On the other, a lorry and an old VW van slide off towards Belchurch; a Rolls trundles majestically along in the slow lane, while a shiny little red box of a car shoots past it on the right. "That's it!" shouts Willow. "That's the car chasing Buffy!"

"The Rolls?" says Giles.

"No. The—er—smart car."

"Let me get this right. The forces of darkness are pursuing Buffy's hearse—in a smart car?"

"See for yourself." Willow points to the aetheric scanner. She has zeroed in on two signatures: in one, rapidly falling behind the other, three traces are arranged in a pattern that suggests passengers and chauffeur; but the other is a boiling cloud of dark colours, pulsing with blotches of phosphene green. Giles removes his glasses and leans closer, counting.

"How," says Willow, "do you fit seventeen aetheric traces into a car the size of a dog-kennel? The answer is that you don't, because it isn't a smart car. I've heard of glamours that can fool a camera as well as the eye. Cool."

"Or," offers Dawn, "it could just be seventeen very small demons. Or maybe it isn't a smart car, and Buffy's hearse isn't a hearse either."

Willow's face clouds again. "Who knows? The scanner shows Buffy's trace in what looks like a hearse, and it shows seventeen aetheric traces in what looks like a smart car, and that's all I can say."

"And your Angel hypothesis?"

"I stand by my gut."

"Whatever," says Dawn, looking back up at the monitor. Lai Lin has put up the screen caps from the webcam. The tiny red car passing under the camera has left a blurred impression of nobody at all in the driver's seat.

Lai Lin looks up at Giles with worry in her eyes. "There may be nobody driving, sir, but they're catching up to Buffy. They'll be up with her in about fifteen minutes."

xxx

Liam eased the hearse out of the shed and swung it in a smooth right turn down the lane towards the pub. Buffy anxiously scanned the parking lot beside the pub as they drove past—several cars and pickups in varying degrees of countrified muddiness, a couple of shinier sedans, a tiny red smart car with English plates. Two elderly men in flat caps were sitting on a bench beside the door of the pub; they stood respectfully and removed their caps as the hearse passed. A man in a brown tweed jacket pushed by them and hurried towards the smart car. Buffy craned to watch as the pub receded behind them.

"That smart car shot out of the parking lot and took off down your lane," she said to Liam. "Do you suppose…?"

"It's possible," said Liam. "By the way, there's paperwork under the seat. Could you put it in the glove compartment? And put your passport in, as well."

Buffy groped under the seat and came up with a large manila envelope, unaddressed, but with a somber black crest in one corner, and a post-it note bearing a scrawl of numbers in another. "Paperwork?"

"The papers we'll need to board the ferry. Permits and such."

"What for?"

"For transporting a body across the water."

"Spike? I mean, William?"

"The same. He'll make a convincing corpse, don't you think? What better way to transport a vampire?"

"You had this all thought out, didn't you?"

"We figured they'd find us sometime. This was our exit plan, though we had no idea where we'd run to until you came along." Liam eased the hearse onto a busier road cutting through tracts of newly built suburbs and shopping precincts, with here and there the traces of an older Ireland. Buffy felt her tension unwind a turn or two, now they were among the protective coloration of other people, but—a hearse? Not the most inconspicuous of vehicles. As they passed, men on the sidewalks bared their heads in respect, and women crossed themselves.

From somewhere behind her right ear, she heard a sound of wood scraping on wood, and then William's voice. "All well, Liam?"

"A clean getaway, I hope. Get back in your coffin. What if someone saw the corpse peering over the undertaker's shoulder?"

"The glass is tinted. And I need a pen—can't do my crosswords without a pen. It's bloody dull in that coffin otherwise."

Buffy rummaged a pen from her purse and passed it back.

"Thanks, love. You wouldn't want your pet corpse dying of boredom, would you?"

xxx

It was mid-evening when they pulled into Dublin Port, and the tidy lines of vehicles waiting for the Liverpool ferry were long and daunting. So many massive trucks, as well—Buffy found it hard to believe they could all be jammed onto one ship, unless that ship were the size of the _Titanic_. She had a terrible feeling they were too late, that the ferry would fill up and sail without them; and any moment that Liam and Will were outside the safe haven of Stapleton Manor was one moment too many.

"Look at all the vehicles," she moaned. "We'll never get on."

But Liam was guiding the hearse, not onto the slip road that led to the white-marked queuing lanes, but past it to something that looked like a tollbooth attached to a breeze-block garage. Beyond it was the glass-fronted terminal building, backed by a smooth silver sea.

"Relax," Will said from the back of the hearse, "We're in no danger of missing the boat. I had plenty of time to book the tickets while you two were rediscovering each other. Anyway, we're special, we are."

"Strewth, Will, get yourself battened down! We're nearly to the inspection post. Buffy, I'll need the papers out of the glove compartment." Liam pulled up at the tollbooth and stepped out of the car, the envelope of paperwork in hand, as two uniforms emerged to meet him. They conferred for a moment over the papers, then Liam followed them confidently into the little building. Watching him go, Buffy felt like a piece of iron being pulled away from a magnet—how could she have spent two years without him, when two minutes now felt like an eternity? Three minutes. Four. Five. She must have made some small, impatient sound, because Will's voice, muffled by the coffin but perceptibly amused, said, "Don't even think about it, Slayer. He'll be back." And indeed, Liam emerged at that moment with three somber-faced men in uniform, who all removed their peaked caps as they approached the hearse. An eager-looking spaniel trotted beside them.

"It's young he was, poor soul," Buffy heard one of them say as the rear door of the hearse swung open.

"Oh aye," said Liam, "and him with a wife and weans waiting for him in London, too. A sorrowful thing to be sure."

"Ah, the creature." Buffy heard someone clicking his tongue sadly, pictured the mournful shake of his head. The dog was already inside the hearse, sniffing around the coffin, snuffling in Buffy's direction over the back of the seat. Then the rear door slammed shut and the driver's door opened. An apologetic official compared her to her passport photo, nodded to her, and handed the papers back to Liam. Moments later, Liam was back in the driver's seat, and the hearse was being waved forward.

"That's it?" said Buffy.

Liam grinned. "As Will said, we're special. They'll hardly leave a hearse waiting in line with the rest of the vehicles. It wouldn't be respectful. We'll be first on the ferry at this end, and first off at the other. And look—here comes the ferry now."

xxx

On the wallscreen, the hearse approaches the Millcaster exit and veers off onto the slip road.

"Right, she's off the M6. Miss Hua, how far behind is the smart car?"

"Not more than ten minutes, Mr. Giles. Maybe less. That invisible driver has the pedal to the metal."

They watch the screens breathlessly. Cars after cars, lorries after lorries, pass under the Millcaster webcam. Giles glances at his watch. "Miss Hakim, what's the status of Plan C?"

"The drones are deployed, sir, and moving into position. Three teams are converging on Millcaster, with orders to use the Gift Package protocol once they spot the hearse. We've got—"

"There's the smart car," Dawn breaks in, "and it's taking the Millcaster exit."

"Right," says Giles, "the game is on. Are there any, er, webcams on the Millcaster road?"

"Yes, sir," says Lai Lin slowly. "But—look at this, Mr. Giles, she's just turned _off_ the Millcaster road."

On the GPS screen, the yellow blip that represents Buffy's chip is moving at speed along what appears to be a narrow country lane, angling southeast away from Millcaster. Giles' eyes follow the road along the map. It winds a bit, swings wide around a village, heads through a broad stretch of farmland towards a range of hills marked as the site of an abandoned quarry. And there it ends.

"Where does she think she's going?" Giles breathes. "Willow, where's the smart car? Has she lost it?"

"Looks like she has—it isn't moving." Willow taps the strange roiling signature on the screen of the aetheric scanner, just a second before it begins to move again. Biting her lip, she glances back and forth from the scanner to the GPS screen. "Damn it, Giles, they're back on the move, and I think they've picked up her trail."

xxx

On deck, Buffy watched over the rail as, one by one, the lines of vehicles threaded themselves into the open maw of the ferry. About half were freight lorries, while the rest were a motley crowd of family cars, coaches, SUVs, even a gaudily painted VW van that had clearly fallen into the hands of hippies in its old age, and a stylish RV towing a compact car. None of them set off her internal alarm system. When the last vehicle was miraculously crammed aboard and the ferry began its slow drift from the quay, she gave a sigh of relief and turned to watch the last of the sunset—and swung back again at a screech of tires from the shore.

Somebody, it seemed, really _really_ wanted to catch that ferry. A tiny red vehicle, a smart car, zipped across the queuing lines of the ferry lot and pulled up at the barrier. A man in a brown tweed jacket jumped out, waving furiously—Buffy shook her head, wondering whether he actually expected the ferry to come back just for him.

Smart car? Why did that ring a bell? Buffy caught her breath. The pub at the end of Will and Liam's lane. A bright red smart car. A man in a tweed jacket. She squinted down at the driver, and , yes, it was all too possible. He was standing quietly under the sodium lights now, glowering up at the ferry, and she had a terrible feeling he was staring straight at her. The strip of water widened behind the ferry; the smart car and its driver were eclipsed by the terminal building. They were safe for the moment, Buffy thought, unless the smart car sprouted wings—but once they reached Liverpool, they could be in trouble as deep as the Irish Sea.

Liam and Will were waiting for her in the main bar, one deck down. William had voiced strongly worded objections to spending the eight-hour crossing in his coffin on the car deck, while Buffy and Liam got to live it up in the bar and sleep in a real bed. And as for the _other_ thing, he'd said with rare delicacy, he had taken the precaution of booking two cabins, not one, and he would thank them to keep the noise down while he was trying to sleep next door. So Buffy had gone on ahead to surveil the vehicles boarding the ferry, while the lads waited until most passengers had left the car deck before Will climbed out of his coffin. Ireland had enough miracles without a resurrection on the car deck of the Liverpool ferry.

They were sitting at a corner table, far from the windows, though the sun had already vanished on the far side of Ireland. Buffy wound her way through the press of tables, wincing at the racket from the video arcade next door. It looked like mainly lorry drivers in the bar itself—the families would be putting little ones to bed in the cabins below, lovers would still be strolling the decks, teenagers would be the ones making the ungodly noise in the video arcade. A few older couples were dotted around the bar, and Buffy surmised that two apparent time travellers from the sixties, complete with wispy beards, sandals and psychedelic tee-shirts, belonged to the hippie-painted VW van. Another table seemed to be a small acting troupe sporting imperfectly removed theatrical makeup, _all_ of them downing pink gins; a tour group of Americans from one of the coaches had all opted for Guinness. Will and Liam were happily nursing beers, and had a white wine set up for her, but their smiles died when she lowered herself wearily into her chair.

"What's wrong?" Liam asked. "Did you see something suspicious?"

Smart car. Tweed jacket. Driver furious at missing the ferry. The story sounded thin even to herself as Buffy told it, but Liam's face grew grimmer, and Buffy could tell Will's sensitive vampire-ears were on the alert. "And so," she finished, "if that really was the car I saw in Galway—and I'm pretty sure that it was—the powers of darkness know that we're on the boat. They can't reach us here, but you can bet the farm someone will be waiting for us in Liverpool—maybe not Old Tweedy, and maybe not the smart car, but _someone._ And we could hardly be travelling in a more conspicuous vehicle."

Liam laid his hand on Buffy's. "Maybe," he said, "and maybe not." He was not looking deep into her eyes, though; he was not looking at her at all. His eyes, narrowed, were aimed at something beyond her. "Will," he said, "how much cash are you carrying?"

Will followed the direction of Liam's gaze. "On me? Everything we had under the mattress. About six thousand euros, and eight thousand quid. But if you offer more than five thousand, I'll kill you myself."

"What on earth are you talking about?" Buffy turned to see what was so interesting—the acting troupe? The lorry drivers playing cards at the next table? The hippies? The Americans?

Liam finished his beer and got to his feet. "I think," he said, "that it's time we made some new friends."

xxx

"I want a drone over the quarry—how long will the helicopter take?"

"Drone Two is about to make visual contact, sir. The chopper's about twenty minutes out."

"She doesn't have twenty minutes," says Dawn. Her lips are as pale as her markedly pale face; Giles can see tears beginning to gather along her lower lids. He presses her shoulder and turns back to the aetheric scanner, where the two traces—the glowing singleton and the writhing bruise-coloured multiple cluster—are running a race across the screen. Whatever evil it is that is chasing Buffy, it is continuing to gain on her. Then Lai Lin shouts, "Visual contact, sir!" and Giles can see the chase in real time from a God's-eye view as the drone passes over the smart car, and then the lumbering, jolting hearse, which is clearly not built for a country lane. Both vehicles are already past the village and among the fields, with nowhere to go but uphill to the rapidly looming dead end.

And there it is—the old quarry, a narrow, steep-walled scar cut deep into the limestone escarpment, half filled with sullen grey water. There is a barrier at the edge of the cliff, where the road emerges from a stand of trees and ends in a tiny plateau. Both vehicles are climbing the hill now, toy cars, the little red box gaining on the labouring hearse, not much more than a minute or two behind—and then the hearse passes out of the drone's view, under the trees.

"She's stopped," breathes Willow.

But a second later, the hearse bursts out from under the trees, rockets through the barrier to the cliff edge, and takes flight into empty space over the dull water—a very short flight that ends abruptly at the rock face on the far side of the quarry. The drone picks up the crash of the impact, then thunder as the wreckage explodes. Dawn screams; Giles sees what looks like a flame-wrapped body among the fiery debris pinwheeling towards the lake far below—he puts a hand over his eyes, but forces himself to look again.

The smart car is just pulling up to the edge of the cliff. A man in a brownish jacket emerges—tweed, Giles thinks irrelevantly through his daze—and then another, and another, and another, until seventeen identical men in identical brownish jackets stand on the edge of the cliff, watching the last of the flaming wreckage slip under the grey surface of the lake far below. When nothing remains visible but a few pieces of floating debris, they all pile into the smart car again, like sardines packing themselves into a can. The car reverses and starts down the hill at a more leisurely pace.

"Giles," says Willow.

He cannot think. When he closes his eyes, all he sees is the hearse crumpling against the solid rock, the starburst of the explosion, the fiery body falling away...

" _Giles_ ," says Willow in a sharper tone. "The body—that wasn't Buffy. Buffy's okay."

"Wha..what?"

Willow points at the scanner. "Her aetheric trace. She's alive and well, not on fire, and on the right side of the quarry. But if it really was Angel she found, it looks like she's lost him again, and for good this time. She'll be gutted, Giles. And she'll blame herself." She covers her face with her hands.

"She'll be ready to cut her own throat," Dawn adds miserably, "and it's all my fault. If I hadn't shown her that stupid picture..."

"We don't know that it was Angel," says Giles, aware of how unconvincing he sounds. God's truth, he can't even convince himself. The image of the man-figure tumbling in flames towards the water replays before his mind's eye. The right size for Angel; the right clothes, all black and stylish and melancholy. The flames could be from the sunlight as much as from the explosion. Giles surprises himself by feeling a stinging in his eyes, almost as if he is weeping. Ludicrous.

"There she is," says Lai Lin, too quietly. Giles forces himself to look at the screen. And indeed, a doll-sized figure with shining hair is just coming out from under the trees. It turns its face up as if searching the sky, then waves its arms directly at the drone.

"Bring the drone closer," Giles says. "And where's that bloody helicopter?"

xxx

Buffy spotted the reception committee as soon as she drove through the port exit onto the streets of Liverpool. It was unlikely to be the _same_ red smart car, she thought, but perhaps tiny blood-coloured cars that were easy to park were all the rage among the Big Bad. There was no visible driver, though she had a brief impression of churning darkness filling the little car, shot with flashes of sickly green. She glanced at the mirror just in time to see the VW van turn off onto a side street at the same time as the smart car swung into traffic a few slots behind her.

"Right," she muttered to the dark, still figure strapped into the passenger seat, "they're clear. All we have to do now is follow the signs for the M6." Not to her surprise, the figure didn't answer. Liam and Will would need new wardrobes, she thought. Every stitch they owned, except the clothes on their backs, had gone into making the dummy.

She checked her watch. The lads would be pulling up at the central train station in a few minutes, to drop off two pleased and much richer hippies—who, she thought, had been pretty damn good at bargaining, for young men who had theoretically rejected materialism, running the price of the clapped-out van up to seven thousand pounds. For her part, however, the timing was going to be tricky. She had to keep safely ahead of the smart car, but be careful not to lose it. She was sure they would follow; they were not expecting to see Will and Liam's aetheric traces in the hearse anyway, had no reason to notice the VW van, and with luck the dummy would fool them. But the truly tricky part would be at the quarry.

Liam had not been happy with the plan. _Too dangerous_ , he kept saying. _Piece of cake_ , she kept answering. even as she researched possible locations on her Blackberry, found and rejected several candidates, settled on the quarry, and memorized the route. She would have scant seconds to set fire to the dummy, leap out of the moving hearse, and hide in the trees before her pursuers arrived—but they had to _see_ the hearse crash, had to _see_ Angel fall in flames into the quarry. Only then would Liam and Will be safe.

xxx

"What's she saying? Did anyone catch it?" Giles is practically nose-to-nose with the screen-Buffy, as if trying to read her lips. The drone's microphone is overwhelmed by the incoming chopper, but Buffy seems to have something hugely important to communicate.

"Hippies, sir. Something about hippies," says Lai Lin.

"Mr. Giles?" says Fawzia, back at the alarm panel.

"Not now, Miss Hakim."

"Definitely something about hippies," says Dawn.

"Mr. Giles?"

" _Not now_ , Miss Hakim! Why on earth would she be talking about hippies? Can you clear up the sound, Miss Hua?"

"Lippies?" says Willow. "Tippies? Zippies?"

Giles stares at her. "That makes even less sense than 'hippies'."

 _"Mr. Giles,"_ Fawzia shouts. "There's a situation at the gatehouse." Her fingers scramble on her keyboard. The wallscreen splits. On one side, Buffy continues to mouth frantically at the drone while her hair flies in the backwash from the helicopter. The other side shows the gate to Stapleton Manor, where Connor is staring through the titanium bars at what Giles can only describe as a _most peculiar vehicle_. Even stranger, Connor seems to shout to the duty slayer in the gatehouse, the gates slide open, the luridly painted van rolls through, the gates clang shut. Connor yanks open the driver's door and flings himself at the driver.

"Connor's hugging someone," says Lai Lin.

"We're talking about _Connor_ ," says Fawzia.

"That hippie looks a lot like Angel," says Dawn.

"But he's not on fire," adds Willow.

Buffy's voice, loud and clear and anxious, comes through the feed from the helicopter. "Are they safe? Are they safe?"

Giles automatically takes off his spectacles and polishes the lenses. Nothing makes sense—yet. What does Buffy mean, _they_? How do a hearse and a VW van horrifically painted with giant sunflowers fit into the parameters of a sensible universe? Why has that young man who looks remarkably like Angel _not_ burst into flame in the sunlight? Giles suddenly fails to care about the answers. He is sure that all will eventually be made clear; meantime, the universe is a brighter and happier place than it appeared to be only five minutes ago. He gestures to Lai Lin to open a channel to the chopper.

"Yes, Buffy," he says. "They're safe. And they're home."


End file.
